1.85 lakh voters deleted from Manipur, Sikkim electoral rolls after SIR
The Election Commission of India published the final electoral rolls for Manipur and Sikkim following a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter lists, with roughly 1.85 lakh names removed across the two states compared with the pre-SIR rolls.
In Manipur, about 6.3% of voters were deleted from the rolls; the final roll nonetheless shows more registered women than men, continuing a trend seen in the state's electoral data.
In Sikkim, about 11.2% of voters were removed from the rolls during the exercise.
Community organisations representing the Kuki-Zo population in Manipur have flagged concerns that conflict-related displacement may have caused eligible voters to be missed or wrongly excluded during the door-to-door enumeration and claims process, given that the state has experienced sustained ethnic unrest and internal displacement.
Special Intensive Revision (SIR) — Legal Basis and How It Differs from Annual Revision
Electoral rolls in India are ordinarily updated through a Special Summary Revision each year, which mainly adds new eligible voters and removes those who have died or shifted, based on updates to an existing roll. A Special Intensive Revision (SIR), by contrast, is a more thorough house-to-house re-verification exercise that reconstructs the roll from a fresh enumeration, requiring existing electors to file enumeration forms and, in some cases, supporting documents, to be retained on the roll — closer to a rebuild than an update.
The Manipur and Sikkim SIR exercises are the practical application of this statutory revision power, and the scale of deletions (6.3% in Manipur, 11.2% in Sikkim) reflects how a full re-enumeration removes far more names than a routine annual update would, raising the stakes for anyone who could not complete the enumeration process, such as internally displaced persons.
Article 371C — Manipur's Special Provision for Hill Areas
Article 371C, inserted by the Constitution (27th Amendment) Act, 1971 at the time Manipur was elevated from a Union Territory to a full state, provides special protection for Manipur's Hill Areas (largely inhabited by tribal communities, including Kuki-Zo groups) by empowering the President to require a Hill Areas Committee of the state legislature, comprising members elected from Hill Areas constituencies, and requiring the Governor to report annually to the President on the administration of these areas. It reflects a broader constitutional scheme (alongside the Sixth Schedule for parts of the Northeast) of giving tribal-majority hill regions a distinct institutional voice within an otherwise unitary state legislature.
Because Kuki-Zo populated constituencies fall largely within Manipur's constitutionally distinct Hill Areas, accuracy and completeness of electoral rolls there carries added significance for the special representational architecture Article 371C is meant to protect.
Documentation and the Displacement-Verification Problem in Electoral Rolls
SIR enumeration typically requires electors to be physically present or reachable to fill enumeration forms and, where required, produce supporting documents proving identity and ordinary residence. Internally displaced persons — those who have fled their homes due to conflict but remain within India — are not covered by any separate legal status comparable to refugees, and their displacement can disrupt the residence-verification process central to voter-roll accuracy, since Section 20 of the RP Act ties registration to a person's "ordinary residence," which temporary displacement does not automatically extinguish, but which is difficult to verify without documentation or physical presence.
Key Details
- Ordinary residence (RP Act, 1950, Section 20) is not lost merely by temporary absence, but proving it during a re-enumeration exercise becomes harder without residence documents.
- India has no dedicated domestic law for internally displaced persons (IDPs); their protection largely rests on general disaster-management and constitutional rights frameworks rather than a specific IDP statute.
- The Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) and Aadhaar are commonly used supporting documents in enumeration, but neither is, by itself, conclusive legal proof of citizenship or ordinary residence for electoral purposes.
Concerns raised about the Manipur SIR reflect this general tension between a uniform, document-driven, address-verification process and the ground reality of populations displaced by conflict who may lack current proof of ordinary residence at their pre-displacement address.
- Approximately 1.85 lakh voters deleted from the Manipur and Sikkim electoral rolls combined, after the SIR exercise.
- Manipur: about 6.3% of voters deleted; women continue to outnumber men on the final rolls (Manipur's final 2026 rolls recorded roughly 19.6 lakh total electors, with more female than male electors, consistent with earlier state trends).
- Sikkim: about 11.2% of voters removed from the rolls during SIR.
- Legal basis for SIR: Article 324 (ECI's superintendence power) + Section 21(3), Representation of the People Act, 1950.
- Article 326 guarantees universal adult suffrage for citizens 18 years and above.
- Article 371C (inserted by the 27th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1971) provides Manipur's Hill Areas Committee mechanism, distinct from Sixth Schedule autonomous councils elsewhere in the Northeast.